As the Star Tribune series, "Generation Debt," documented this week, the high cost of higher education has become much more than a stress point for low-income students and their families. The pain is felt more widely than at any time since the GI Bill was new, reaching far into the ranks of the middle class and lasting long after graduation day. The big debt loads a majority of college grads take with them when they leave campus affect their lives for years to come.

It's only natural, then, that concern about higher education's rising cost has found its way to the State Capitol. It's understandable for legislators to want to hold down tuition as they wrestle with the second major deficit in this decade. The candid among them acknowledge that the Legislature's decisions during the first downturn were the main culprits for the tuition spike of 2003-06.

But when legislators usurp the rightful role of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Board of Trustees, they go too far. That's what has happened in the House's omnibus higher education bill, now in the hands of a House-Senate conference committee. The House bill trespasses too far into the governing boards' domain, particularly as it attempts to cap tuition increases at 2 percent in MnSCU and $300 at the university in each of the next two years.

Those caps are low, but they are not inconsistent with the tuition plans already being sketched by MnSCU trustees and university regents. Their level is not the problem; their provenance, and the precedent they would set, are. If legislators can claim setting tuition this year is "doing my job" -- the justification for the caps uttered Tuesday by House higher education chair Tom Rukavina -- it can and likely will become their role every year.

That would bring about more political sway over college and university operations than this state's founders thought desirable. They created a separate governing board for the University of Minnesota as they wrote the state Constitution in 1857 at least in part to buffer institutions of learning from the short-term, partisan influences that prevail in electoral politics.

MnSCU's protection from legislative micromanagement does not rise to constitutional heights. But since its founding via a three-way merger in the 1990s, its gubernatorially appointed trustees have been free to set tuition, hire top administrators and manage the system largely as they see fit.

The House bill's drift into micromanagement does not stop with tuition. If that bill becomes law, the Legislature will also be dictating alcohol sales policies at the new TCF Bank football stadium; capping the share of state money for the MnSCU central office; putting a floor on the amount each of MnSCU's 54 campuses can receive; requiring a wage and hiring freeze among administrators in both systems; and barring MnSCU from employing a search firm to help fill any vacant position. Those latter two provisions seem particularly ill-advised at a time when MnSCU is led by a 70-year-old chancellor who has served since 2001.

It's not clear that the provisions affecting the University of Minnesota would survive a court test of their constitutionality. But it should not come to that. As conferees craft the final version of this session's higher education omnibus bill, they should restrain their impulse to treat the state's two higher education systems as if they were state agencies, fully under elected officials' thumbs. They are not, and attempts to make them so should be resisted.